Dear Mihai,
Welcome to the club! You
covered numerous topics of interest here, so I hope you will be a frequent
contributor.
Among other things, you said:
MN: ...
what I perceive to be the fundamental question of your self-constitution as
ontologists: how to map an open system (language as a medium of _expression_,
communication, and signification) to a closed system (interactions with a
machine).
It isn't necessarily true that a
machine is a closed system. The ultimate conversing machine, for example,
can acquire and store new experiences with new syntax, concepts, vocabularies,
or just verbs, nouns, adjectives and the like.
IMHO, conversing with a closed
system would be like conversing with a person who has a total short term memory
deficit - what I said two sentences ago is no longer in its database as the
current knowledge.
It would be like saying humans
are closed because they are limited to just two eyes, ears, hands, arms, legs,
... and one each head, thorax, backbone, ... and therefore humans are closed
systems.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Nadin,
Mihai
Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2015 2:08 PM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: [ontolog-forum] some of the challenge(s) ontologists face
Dear and respected colleagues,
After observing the ontolog-forum for a while, I am glad I
asked to be accepted to the list. (John Sowa made me aware of it.) The buoyancy
of the discussions testifies to impatience: we want to understand what we do,
and we are aware that the domain knowledge in which we are active is larger
than what has been assumed so far. We want to engineer in a domain that is
different from an engineering model anchored in the past.
Is it knowledge engineering (splendid formula, but quite
ambiguous)? Is it semantic engineering? (To give an answer would require
a better understanding of semantics, or, better yet, of semiotics.) What is it,
since nobody teaches ontological engineering? In ADDITION, you also want
to change the world (government, democracy, transactions, you name it).
To be clear: at times I cringed. Some concepts are dealt
with without discipline. Some views are incoherent—for me, as an
observer. Just one example: you cannot make reference to great authors of
the past but dismiss a book from the 80s because it is old. However, I was
rewarded for my patience: I learned a lot.
Now to what I want to say. We are what we do (cf. The
Civilization of Illiteracy, available on many sites, http://www.nadin.ws/archives/429).
In short, as you read this mail, this is who you are. You self-constitute in
the act of reading and thinking about what you read, in the act of
understanding, in the act of arguing with what you read or of accepting it. When
you work on ontologies, that work defines you: you are self-constituting as
ontologist. Of course, the world we share is the same; the activities through
which we become what we are, are DIFFERENT. We construct our world again and
again as we make ourselves part of it. These activities inform, guide our
perception of the world; they engage our physical and spiritual resources
(emotions, logic, sensitivity, etc.). We do not “see” the world the
same way because we, all of us, are different. (I used the quotation marks
around see in order to suggest the richness of the sensory experience.)
Yes, the living is infinitely diverse, heterogenous.
With these simple thoughts articulated
as premise, allow me to bring to your attention what I perceive to be the fundamental
question of your self-constitution as ontologists: how to map an open system
(language as a medium of _expression_, communication, and signification) to a
closed system (interactions with a machine).
It is even more complicated: the
ambiguity of language is the outcome of human practical activities inherently
non-deterministic. Computers, and by extension computation, are deterministic.
Artificial languages of all kinds were conceived in order to facilitate the
mapping from the ambiguous to the univocal. If you’ve ever tried
programming in machine language (nothing but zeros and ones), you know what the
machine expects. Everything beyond is ontology at work. The first ontologists
were those who wrote programming languages, and those who programmed.
In the process of outgrowing their
syntax-determined condition, computers are acquiring, with your help, a
semantic dimension. Meaning, however, is pragmatically determined: in what we
DO—not in how we talk about what we do or what we think we do. The next
age of computation (when the computer will finally outgrow its infancy) has
already started—think about robots, for example (for more on this: http://www.nadin.ws/archives/2466
(i.e., predictive and anticipatory computation).
Things are even more
complicated—and I respect your dedication to the impossible: computations
are, by the nature of their condition (cf. Turing, etc.), tractable processes.
We know when the program is complete, and we know that it has to be consistent.
Otherwise the damn thing will not budge (or will run into the infinite loop we
learned about). Well, you are asked to transform the intractable—i.e.,
that which cannot be at the same time complete and consistent—into the
tractable. Goedel watches us all, and smiles. Yes, if you take a large system
and you section it, you can achieve tractability—for the sub-system.
These are the systems that ontologists of all flavors engineered successfully
(management systems, specialized control systems, etc.). Or, to avoid the
pitfalls of language, you train neural networks: “This is how you do
it!” instead of a sequence of commands for asking the machine to do it.
(I leave out here the distinction between algorithmic and non-algorithmic.)
Enough for a first time. Probably I
should be way more concise if I seriously want to become part of the dialog.
Best wishes.
Mihai Nadin
www.nadin.ws
www.anteinstitute.org